Creature of the Shade

iceland: into the void (part 3 of 3)

This series begins at Part 1.

The “now, I'm really there” moment in Iceland happened, for me, in the highlands.  You don’t have to go far.  An hour out of Reykjavík you can be in Thingvellir National Park, another dramatic site in the cleft between continental plates, important to the national narrative as the site of the world’s first parliament.

 

Then, keep going north. Ignore the gratuitous rainbows everywhere.  Icelandic weather is fast-moving and fast-changing, so the sun-rain transition that generates rainbows is a pretty routine event.

Signs warn little cars to turn back, the road turns to black gravel, and you enter a vast, empty landscape of rolling mountains and plains,  thinly painted with life.

We stopped in a small pass where these forms collide.   

I was drawn to a moss-covered spherical scope, rising and curving away from me.

The spongy green carpet seemed to bounce back readily, forgiving my steps.  As I climbed the spherical hill it seemed almost that the surface was rotating toward me, so that I stayed in place.  At a certain point, though, the sides of the moss-mounds became vertical, as though cut off, creating a Hobbiton effect …

 Between the mounds, little sunken gardens, wind-sheltered, for a diversity of tiny plants: heathers, low huckleberries, a few fast summer herbs. There near the autumn equinox, I saw what appeared to be the last flower of the year, from the dandelion clan.

 

This huddled life seems to be the main niche for success in Iceland, for anything more complex than moss or grass.  Later at the Reykjavik Botanic Garden, we noted that the entire Icelandic natives collection is shorter than its guardian cat:

 Back in the highlands, the journey over the great sphere of moss seemed to take forever.   When I finally crested, seeing the tundra plain beyond with glaciers in the distance – this was the moment I chose to identify as “finally, I'm there” and also as “this will do, for now, for me, as the Uttermost End of the Earth.” 

The silence was absolute.  The cars that passed – two in the hour we were there – sounded like buzzing flies only at their closest approach.  Otherwise, the silence seemed active and forceful in suppressing them.  I’m not sure I could have handled the silence if it had been any louder.

Oh yes, and on the way back, more rainbows.  

 

 

iceland: a local habitation (part 2 of 3)

This series begins with Part 1.

 

The touch of humanity in Iceland is always modernist, boxy, out-of-context.  In place so cold, flat and windy that few plants are more than a few inches tall, the humblest hut can only be a tower of arrogance.  You do what you can with steep roofs to manage wind and snow, but you will stick out patriarchally just by standing up.  And viewed from above (plane or distant mountaintop) your house will resemble a child’s toy blocks, carelessly discarded on a vast, smooth floor. 

Which may be why half of Icelanders supposedly believe in elves, or more generally in diminutive “hidden people.”  Full-sized vertical humans look so wrong in this landscape that it’s easy to image there must be a more right-sized genius loci for whom all this is really intended.  If a day on the tundra makes you long for a forest, one solution is to imagine that the cool people here are the very tiny ones, they who stride purposefully through the shade of towering mosses, hunt down antelope-sized beetles, chop house-sized huckleberries down from their inch-high forest canopy, and return in splendor to lichenate cities more ornate than any fantasist could illustrate.  Here too is an echo of Mars.  The hard-headed scientists of Robinson’s novels never quite deny the earlier stories of “little red men” -- maybe so small that those randomly tossed rocks on the Martian plains might serve them as shelter and habitat.

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Iceland is cold but motion is heat, and in Iceland everything seems to be moving under the surface.  Volcanoes are everywhere – the whole island is volcanoes really, all made of massive lava eruptions interspersed with explosions of ash – all still haunting the surface in the form of geysers, steam vents, and bubbling pools.    Our favorite silly tourist spot, in Reykjarnes, was a “bridge between continents,” which is to say between the North American and Eurasian plates.  A little rift valley, full of black sand, with signs welcoming you at each end. It marks the main faultline where Iceland is being slowly ripped into being, created and destroyed at the same time.

 

We made two major expeditions out of Reykjavík, apart from touring volcanic Reskjanes on our wander in from the airport.  First, southeast, to the recently erupted Eyjafjallajökull volcano, then northeast, into the highlands above Thingvellir. 

Eyjafjallajökull: The ö and j are as in German, the “ll” is “tl” or just “t” at the end, and Icelandic stress is always hard on the first syllable, the rest of each word sliding away as though as though down a long slope of scree.  It erupted in 2010, but with ash rather than lava, and ash is good for plants.  So its skirts are all grassy now, treeless of course, and its most striking feature is a cliff around the base that offers a casual abundance of waterfalls. 

We climbed one of these, Skógarfoss ... 

... and encountered, above it, endless grasslands rushing up to the glacier along the fast stream, including a boatload of birch scrub, coming around a corner, that obviously wouldn't have survived contact with the sheep.

The view down the falls, to the farm below, was also intriguing.

The birches were a rare thing.  Heading back into the sunset, we found a row of eight more, the only ones on the entire coastal plain.

 

 Continued at Part 3.

iceland: northward to mars (part 1 of 3)

The process of making Mars habitable for humans will start with microbes, and later a world-spanning carpet of lichen and moss.  First you’ll need to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to warm up the planet a bit, but then plants should spread rapidly, happily gobbling all that carbon dioxide and turning into carbon, for the plant, and oxygen, for us.   Redwoods and apple trees can come later; for sheer quantity and toughness on volcanic rock, mosses and lichens will do the heavy lifting.

I’d been reading about this, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s scientifically careful novel Red Mars, when we landed in Iceland, and drove out onto the volcanic plains surrounding Keflavik airport.  Add a red filter, and I’d have been in the landscape of the novel: rock, moss, and lichen to the horizon, plus cold, hard wind.

 

 (Was the Viking lander named for the people who first landed in Iceland, with this parallel in mind?  The internets are silent on the question.)

Things move faster on Earth of course.  This lava field is from an eruption in the 1300s.  Some of it came down very smooth, creating flat volcanic plains such as the beachside expanse at Reykjarnes where a statue of an extinct great auk contemplates its former habitat …

(It's an impressively remote site for public art, at the end of this long black-gravel road.)

But sometimes new forces blasted apart older layers of lava, flipping them vertical for a ruins of war effect.

Eventually moss and lichen fully covers the lava, and a while after that, you can grow grass on the flat bits, even as the volcano still steams in the distance via a geothermal plant, and hillsides of moss remind you of an earlier stage of history.  Finally, you get a decently terraformed look:

No trees, though.  At the restaurant that evening, rain on the windows turned a barren ridgeline into a mirage of conifer forest.  Mirages always show you what you're most desperate for.

How would one live here?  How would one build anything here?  

Continued at Part 2.